Indeed ‘Uqbani is scandalized by the shameless lack of modesty displayed by the men and women of his day. We learn that, despite the frequent warnings and closings of the hammam by the muḥtasab, men and women continued to frequent it in a state of undress. ‘Uqbani concludes that the hammam is unlawful for women unless it has been completely emptied of men.10 ‘Uqbani gives us clear indications concerning the lesbianism that was widespread in his day and which obviously blossomed in the atmosphere of ostentatious nudity that reigned in the women’s hammam. ‘Especially when encounters with shameless women are an invitation to expose attractions likely to excite a desire that some find more agreeable to satisfy in contact with other women than in copulation with men.’11
The homosexual element in the practices of the hammam did not escape the attentions of the fuqahā and the censors. And indeed the poets have often sung of their love of boys, aroused by the constant spectacle of so many beautiful naked bodies exhibited to view.12
In fact an astonishing promiscuity reigns in the hammam that seems to have survived all the censors and prohibitions. In some Arabo-Muslim countries the total nudity of men is common, that of women almost everywhere the rule. The manager of the hammam always keeps pagnes available for men, who wear them in order to hide the small ‘aura, that is to say, the genitals themselves. But it is quite common to see men not bothering to hide themselves or even apparently turned towards a wall quietly shaving their pubic hair. As for the women there is little doubt that at least half of them are quite happy to wander about stark naked. The others wear a sheet, or some vague cache-sexe.
More important still, when the hammam is open to men, no woman is admitted. Things are quite different when the hammam is open to women. No adult man is admitted, it is true, but boys are. Indeed it is customary for children to go to the hammam with the women and this continues up to the age of puberty. Since the age of puberty is not the same for everyone, the threshold at which one has ‘grown up’ is highly flexible; since a mother always tends to see her son as an eternal child and since the other women are in no way inconvenienced by the presence of a boy, young or not, and since taking a boy to the hammam is a chore that the father would prefer to leave, for as long as possible, to the mother, the spectacle of fairly old children, more or less adolescent, consorting side by side in their nakedness with women of all ages, is by no means rare. It would be enough for the young man to make some thoughtless gesture or say something out of place for the manageress to come up to the boy’s mother and say: ‘Your son has grown up, don’t bring him with you any more.’ What Arabo-Muslim has not been excluded from the world of naked women in this way? What Arabo-Muslim does not remember so much naked flesh and so many ambiguous sensations? Who does not remember the incident by which this world of nakedness suddenly became forbidden? We have been given more than a memory. One could not stop himself pinching that big, hanging breast that had obsessed him. Another was banned for being too hairy, for having too large a penis, buttocks that protruded too much, a displaced organ. . . . For a boy the hammam is the place where one discovers the anatomy of others and from which one is expelled once the discovery takes place. Here is quite an unexceptional childhood memory. ‘I also remember,’ says a Tunisian girl, ‘all those hideous old women, with folds of fat and drooping breasts, who wandered shamelessly about among young children.’13
More detailed and more significant is the delicate, precise evocation to be found in a book by the Moroccan writer Ahmad Sefrioui,14 which admirably describes the ‘atmosphere’ of the hammam through the eyes of a child who finds himself thrown into a strange and wonderful world. As the author makes quite clear, the hammam is a great deal more than merely a place for washing. An unexpected world, mingled memories, modesty and immodesty, lassitude and relaxation, everything is mixed together and melts together in the damp, steamy atmosphere of the warm rooms, but also in our minds. We are born, as children, in the hammam. And when we become adults we people it with our childhood memories, our fantasies, our dreams, and every Muslim can relive his childhood in terms of his experience of the hammam. Yes, one can speak of a ‘hammam complex’. Indeed a whole area of sexual life is organized around the hammam: the real and the refusal of the real, childhood and puberty, transition and initiation, are integrated in a kind of constellation of meanings crystallized in the hammam.
For a Muslim to reach puberty is to enter the age of responsibilities. Bulūgh is the end of childhood, but it transforms the child into a mukallaf, a responsible being. The world known up to that point was that of the gynaeceum and the world of women. One waited impatiently to enter the male world and what that implied at every level of existence. Puberty is the moment when sexuality comes to the forefront, when one takes one’s leave of the female world, where having become a man, one is expected to behave as a man. From now on one has to fast and pray. One is held fully responsible for one’s actions and words. To enter the world of adults also means, perhaps, above all, to frequent only men, to see only men, to speak only to men. Female cousins and even nieces are all too often suddenly hidden from view. At home one’s sisters and even one’s own mother become semi-strangers. The gap between the sexes in Arabo-Muslim society is now consummated.
Indeed one must now enter another social sphere, that of mono-sexual promiscuity. Spiritual actions, but also political, economic, aesthetic and even biological actions are performed in common. The body is now literally snatched up by the male world. Purification is performed collectively in the midhas or hammams and prayer in the mosques. Everywhere, in the souk, in the medersa and in the café, the youth belongs to an all-male community. More seriously still, this is accompanied by the derealization of the female world. The world of women is a ‘sub-world’, devoid of seriousness and all too easily treated with the contempt that boosts the male’s confidence in himself, in his knowledge, in his wishes and in his power.
The oath bi-sa qawmin wallaw umūrahum imra-a (woe betide those who trust a woman) applies not only to the political domain. Not only is it not necessary to speak to a woman about money or one’s plans, it is even thought to be prudent not to do so. We have been taught that we should ‘ask their opinion, but do the opposite’, shāwirhinna wa khālifhinna. Woman herself, like her world, is derealized. At puberty the child becomes aware of this too. From that moment on, he is trained to direct all his energies towards the cult of a life shared with other males and towards the systematic depreciation of femininity.
This appears even in language. There are street words that one never says at home, at least in the presence of women. Women are supposed not to know them. They never say them, in any case in front of men. These words belong to what might be called obscene folklore. They create a sort of complicity between people of the same sex and transform the community of sex into a community of promiscuity, and even sometimes into a community of systematic infantilization. These blasphemies, these rude words, these indecent forms of behaviour are merely the expression of a sexual division based on misogyny and a collective derealization of woman.
Now this is, as we have seen, precisely the moment when the male child, excluded from the women’s hammam, sets out on the road to the men’s hammam. It is like an initiation rite into the hitherto alien world of the males. The practices of the hammam are structured in a new way from the moment one is taken from one’s mother, so that the first hammam taken with men is like a consecration, a confirmation, a compensation. It is a confirmation of belonging to the world of males. Has one not been rejected by the women’s hammam? Did one not hear the manageress declare: ‘He’s too old’? Did one not receive the congratulations of one’s father’s friends, whom one now meets for the first time scantily dressed and some of whom will not fail to make indecent propositions. . . .
The hammam becomes an imaginary return to the ancient world – a lost world of earlier times, rediscovered with each visit. Each plunge into the hammam bath plunges one back into childhood. Childhood fantasies, evocations o
f the past, aspirations, desires, all become confused in this hot and cold steam that calms the body and excites the spirit. The hammam is a place of infinite variety, haunted by so many memories, so many themes, so many visions, all jumbled together, in which one’s mother, sisters and cousins and enigmatic neighbours’ wives make up this oneiric bouquet of femininity that each man bears within himself.
One must know how to read the practices of the hammam in order to understand the extent to which it is a regression to the prepubertal stage. Frustrated in his sexual tendencies by the society of males, the young man necessarily finds himself back in the hammam at a more rudimentary level of behaviour. He has little control over his emotions, his discriminations are less subtle, his reactions less complex. Hence that sense of unease described by Sefrioui. So it is hardly surprising, as we have already seen, if the hammam is notoriously a place of homosexuality, male and female.
Indeed there is a whole tradition of popular beliefs concerning copulation at a distance through the hammam. Certain ‘virgin’ pregnancies were explained by sperm left on the marble slabs by males and absorbed a few moments later by women carelessly sitting down on it. So a prudent woman is careful to wash the place where she sits down in the hammam. More generally a man is advised against sitting in a place left vacant by a woman until it has cooled down, ‘idhā qāmat al-mar-atu falā tajlis fī mauḍi-’ihā ḥatṭā yabruda’ – and conversely. A place warmed by the sex of the person that has just left is supposed to give a certain unlawful pleasure. Among many of our virgins there is even a sort of obsessional anxiety about getting pregnant in this way. Various forms of ‘hammamophobia’ arise from the nudity, promiscuity and psychical traumata that derive from it.
The hammam is a place where the sense of observation, especially of the female anatomy, is refined. There the child has all the time in the world to contemplate, examine and compare sexual organs. Sometimes they are young, without a single fold, close-shaven, polished and shining, but sometimes they are limp, soft things, flabby and drooping. The vulva appears as a beautiful thing to be ravished, or, on the contrary, as something disgusting and dangerous: a repulsive abyss with teeth. Hence the ambivalence of men’s memories of the hammam in which the beauty and ugliness of female sexual organs are inextricably mixed.
Indeed many love affairs began in the hammam. I analyse one example in my Dix contes tunisiens pour enfants.15 There are many others to be found in The Thousand and One Nights. There is Tuḥfa, the beautiful maid of Princess Zubeida, who stayed late in the hammam. There she saw a young lady. ‘It was the moon. No one has ever seen or will ever see a more adorable creature. The whole universe has not known a more beautiful woman. . . .’16 Cursed be the women who goes off and describes to her husband a beautiful creature seen in the hammam. It would not be long before this same beauty became her rival and co-wife!
The hammam is a sexually overestimated place. It may be seen as a uterine environment. It is so psychically and oneirically – as I think I have shown – but it is so also physically and topographically. Its labyrinthine form is highly significant. Unlike the Roman balneae, the hammams are below ground level in order to assist the water pressure and to preserve heat. The already complex and highly elaborate form of the Roman thermae is here complicated still further. Reaching the hottest centre, the maghtas, requires between seven and ten detours. One descends into the hammam as one descends into hell. One slides into it before finding onself in the mathāra or khilwa, the most intimate place, but also the most diabolical.
The myth of the hammam is marked not only by the S-shaped topography, but also by a whole dimension of fantasy. For no sooner has one plunged into the hammam than the corridor alone, with its series of ever deeper, ever warmer rooms raises up a whole world of dreams. To plunge into the hammam is to plunge into increasing heat and to isolate oneself increasingly from the outside world. It is also a place in which hot or cooling streams flow. They come from the furnace and they flow back into the depths of the earth. A mystery accompanies this ‘stream’, which comes from a hole, traverses a hole and plunges into a hole. Entering the hammam is to plunge into a mystery. It is to return in dream to the mother’s breast.
That is not all, for there is also the use of the ‘earthly’ substance: fuller’s earth or Nile mud (tfal) and ‘broken gold’ (orpiment, or yellow arsenic, known as dhahab maksūr), with which one depilates the genitals and armpits. There is the hard glove with which the masseur or masseuse rubs the skin. And there are all those magico-pharmaceutical medicines: cataplasms, unguents, facial, paints, cloves, henna, incense, thyme, rosemary and other plants and still more aphrodisiacs. All these elements serve as symbols with a strong sexual charge. There is a whole dialectic of the elements in the hammam: hot and cold, hard and soft, feminine and masculine, clean and dirty, pure and impure, inside and outside, self and others, angel and devil. It is understandable, especially in the case of women, why its users are content to spend their hours there. What is one looking for and what does one find if not a warm uterine environment? In the hammam one rediscovers oneself and becomes reconciled with one’s own childhood.
Yes, the hammam is a place of great activation, both physical and psychical. The heat activates the circulation of the blood; but the darkness, the shape, the various elements activate regression, the reanimation of old associations and repressed infantile tendencies. The sexual ‘prohibitions’ bound up with the separation of the sexes make the hammam both the accomplice of social regulation and also a model of more or less stereotyped behaviour. In so far as the hammam maintains the presence of parental images and their imperatives it remains bound up with the memory of the mother and identification with the father. It also extends and surpasses the moral constraints that weigh on the parents themselves. It seeps into the infantile personality at the very point where primitive drives meet the conscious functions of control.
The hammam plays a part, therefore, in the fixation on the mother, but it also tends to transcend that, fixation. Indeed the practices of the hammam have the effect of preventing the regressing libido from stopping at the physical body of the mother. The regression so often remarked on only seems to be reducible to the evocation of the mother. In reality the hammam is the great gate opening on to the ‘kingdom of the mothers’. What a beautiful and potent derivative! And what a magnificent invention of the Arabo-Muslim collective genius!
It enables one to grasp in living detail how the social uses both the sexual and the sacral to integrate them into one another. It is as if the hammam, the social place par excellence, were for society only a means of absorbing, of rationalizing sexuality by admitting the individual to the totality. If it is true that every Muslim is fixated on his mother, this complex, normally repressed, may reappear at any moment. The institution of the hammams dams up this continuous effervescence, allowing it full rein. But then the plunge into this ‘semi-morbid’ state will be of short duration.
Above all it will be normalized and therefore exorcized. Furthermore, Muslim society exploits this unconscious drive to its own advantage by integrating it into an institution that conforms much more to the interests of the group than the fuqahā have admitted. For what would have been an anarchic drive, ruinous for society, is transformed into rituals and myths, becoming crystallized and losing all its morbid characteristics. The hammam has been the way that has enabled Muslim society sufficient leeway. If Muslim society has been able to preserve itself for so many centuries, it may be because of the hammam, which has been able to function as a powerful release of all the tensions to which the Muslim is necessarily subject. In using the hammam Muslim society has forged a valuable instrument for itself to channel the sexual drives liberated by religion, but repressed by the misogynist puritanism that grew up over the centuries and by a strict, universal separation of the sexes that might have proved fatal to it.
Yes, life is pleasant in the hammam. But if, in spite of everything, life is pleasant in the Arabo-Muslim societies, i
t is also thanks to the hammam. As a Latin poet put it, with a touch of irony: ‘balnea, vina, Venus corrumpunt corpora nostra sed vitam faciunt.’17 This is even more valid and may be said without irony of the Arabo-Muslim societies. Ibn Khaldūn18 already noted that the euphoria sensed in the hammam impels people to sing. He was wrong to attribute this euphoria simply to the effect of heat, believed to disturb the physiological equilibrium. The euphoria is that of unlimited psychical happiness rediscovered in a total oneirism that blossoms in the hammam, a place where everything can be reconciled.
2 Circumcision
Ahmed Amin relates how, in the interwar period, a tribe in southern Sudan wanted to be converted en bloc to Islam. It contacted the Islamic University of El Azhar for information concerning the doctrine, practices and laws of Islam and the procedure to be followed to complete the conversion. It was given a list of what had to be done: at the top of the list was circumcision. When the adult members of the tribe refused to have themselves mutilated the whole idea was dropped.19 This gives some idea of the importance accorded by El Azhar as indeed by almost all the Muslim populations to circumcision, which is regarded pre-eminently as the mark of inclusion in Muslim society. Indeed this practice is more or less unanimously observed at every social level and at whatever degree of development and acculturation. No one – not even free thinkers, communists, atheists, or even partners of mixed marriages – ignores the rule. Even in Tunisia under Bour-guiba, which in so many respects has demonstrated its openness to innovation in matters of custom and religion, the number of the uncircumcised cannot exceed a hundred. In the last few years Tunisia has begun to accept that a Muslim Tunisian woman may marry a non-Muslim. This is a very brave measure, indeed one that is unique in the Muslim world and constantly being brought up in the Tunisian parliament. But what people find most shocking about the idea is that a Muslim woman can sleep with an uncircumcized man, even in a lawful marriage! Circumcision is a great deal more than a matter of hygiene, or of mere custom. It is deeply rooted in Islamic mores and certainly corresponds to something fundamental.
Sexuality in Islam Page 21
